


When the Wind Changes

by Star_less



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Babies, Comfort, Crowley is Bad at Being a Demon (Good Omens), Crowley is Good With Kids (Good Omens), Crowley is Nanny Ashtoreth and Himself, Cutesy, Fluff, Gen, He/Him Pronouns For Crowley (Good Omens), Headcanon, Nanny Crowley (Good Omens), One Shot, She/Her Pronouns for Crowley (Good Omens), Silly, Snake Crowley (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-08 06:31:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21471583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_less/pseuds/Star_less
Summary: Sometimes, Crowley likes to pull faces at young children, to make them laugh.(Performing poorly in anything remotely Demonic in the eyes of Everybody Downstairs and finding it difficult to influence Warlock despite being his Nanny, Crowley makes it his mission to be Demonic to babies because, well, because why not....he fails.)
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 142





	When the Wind Changes

**Author's Note:**

> I am the kind of person who pulls faces at babies whenever I see them. I have this headcanon that Crowley would be the type of Demon who pulls faces at babies whenever he sees them. Et voila.

_Children_, thought Nanny Ashtoreth, _were not one of God’s greatest inventions_.  
Well. Perhaps that was partly a lie.  
Nanny Ashtoreth was a Nanny, after all, and she Nannied for a rather fantastic (in only the way children could be) young man by the name of Warlock.  
It was Warlock she was waiting for, in fact. Waiting, with the rest of his classmates' parents, for him to burst out of the classroom door holding aloft a messy looking painting of a duck; a task which propelled her into a new line of thought.  
_Babies_. Babies were not one of Her greatest inventions, Nanny Ashtoreth wearily thought, as she crossed her legs and sat primly, all while resolutely trying to ignore the caterwauling howl of the slobbering baby sat near. Babies with their piercing feed-me cries and their ruddy red noses and their alarming propensity to leak all manner of odd bodily fluids from every possible orifice...  
Admittedly, mostly the cries.  
(And it wasn’t even the Almighty One he could thank for that. Giving a baby its loudest cries was an assignment for everybody Downstairs. Hastur had decided on the particularly toe curling sort of screech that babies seem to excel in. He was very well thought of for it.)  
Then, if she considered Warlock, children were not so bad by comparison. Of course, they had the tendency to ask the most inane of questions at the most inappropriate of times—(_‘Nanny,’_ he had asked once, _‘Do you think one day we will time travel?’_. _‘Errrrrmmm’_ said Nanny very elaborately as if she was unearthing the answer from all the other important things she kept in her brain and certainly wasn't trying to make up an answer, _‘No.’_)—or express a fascination for some bodily fluid or other (Warlock had a very impressive dried bogey collection that he kept on the wall behind his bed) but, all in all, children were fantastic. Their little brains, like sponges, soaking up all the information around them no matter whether it was good or bad. Perfect for a little demonic influence, of course. At least, that was the way it was seen Downstairs. Everybody Downstairs kept count of all the demonic tasks they had carried out. ‘Demonic Influence’ tasks, if you will.  
Crowley had been performing exceptionally poorly in his ‘demonic influence’ tasks. Nobody Downstairs could quite grasp it; Crowley’s position as Nanny Ashtoreth was the perfect position for him to fill a child’s squeaky-clean sponge of a brain with only the best demonic thoughts.  
...except... well, to be perfectly honest Crowley wasn’t sure he could spur young Warlock to be demonic in any sort of way. Young Warlock--who’s chin wobbled whenever he fell and scraped his knees even if he crowed about being brave--demonic? Unlikely. He was only a child. Crowley never quite liked being his most demonic self around children.

“This is unacceptable, Crowley. How can you be so bad at being bad?” Beelzebub crowed when Crowley murmured that no, he hadn’t really encouraged the child to do anything particularly bad -- but he did fill him full of jelly sweets and let him have an extra-large banana milkshake with whipped cream just before a four hour car ride with his parents which, if you thought very hard and squinted for good measure, was very bad.

Nanny Ashtoreth looked at the screaming baby next to her and sighed heavily. If she was going to be bad, why not start with the baby? Babies, after all, were a whole other ball-game. Babies listened to a whole other higher being in comparison to children. There was no chance of filling a baby’s tiny spongey brain with demonic thoughts; they did exactly what they pleased no matter what you told them to do.  
Perhaps… perhaps if he just… made the baby cry a little more. That would annoy all of the other parents sat with them – and upset the baby too…? Oh, what a plan. What a perfect plan. Definitely… definitely some demonic influence going on there

The sobbing baby’s parent was looking the other way, but the sobbing baby was sobbing particularly loudly in Nanny Ashtoreth’s direction.  
Good.  
Lifting up her glasses, Nanny Ashtoreth flashed her yellow slit-eyes and, at the same time, let her forked tongue snap out of her mouth with a quiet-but-threatening sort of hiss.  
Time slowed. The baby was stunned into silence at once, blinking all wet eyed at the Nanny and moving a chubby fist to its mouth… really rather underwhelmed, in fact.  
Oh.  
Well, that wasn’t the reaction she had been expecting. Usually, that sort of behaviour was enough to make people quiver in their boots at just the sight (…or at least that was what it did to her potted plants) – surely a baby would be a screaming, flailing, red-cheeked puddle?!  
Leaning forward, frowning in a mixture of determination and concentration, Nanny lifted her glasses and hissed a little more dangerously, yellow eyes glinting in confusion. At this, the baby pulled back in surprise. A little jolt sparked somewhere under all of Nanny Ashtoreth’s ruffles—yes! it was working!  
The baby pulled back, and drank in Nanny Ashtoreth’s face.  
Her tightly coiffured curls, her glossy purple lips, her bright yellow eyes and pink fork, wibbling around. Slowly, the baby’s chest shuddered up and down. Any moment--Nanny Ashtoreth’s own chest hitched in anticipation, her eyes glinting-- any moment now, and the baby would be a quivering mess…

The baby laughed. 

Well. That had been an even less than expected reaction. If Nanny was shocked at the baby’s absolute lack of horror whatsoever – the little bleeder laughed at her?! _Laughed_?! To add insult to injury it wasn’t even just a little laugh – not even a whisper of a laugh that could have been mistaken for the beginnings of a cry – but a big, whooping sort of belly laugh that couldn’t have been mistaken for a cry in the slightest, the kind of laugh that made the baby jiggle on its mother’s lap and have the tears stopped in a second, replaced by glossy starry eyes. 

“Oh, you’re a happy little lad now…”  
For the first time, the baby’s mother turned her attention to Nanny Ashtoreth. She seemed a little started at the sight of the Nanny, as if she was seeing her for the first time, but then her face filled with relieved gratitude. “Thank you!”

The little jolt under all of Nanny Ashtoreth’s ruffles sparkled into something big and blooming. She smiled to herself, shifting in place, not used to the feeling. “You are welcome.”  
-

The second time, he and Aziraphale were sat on the bench in the park. The park was, with hindsight, not the best place for the two to meet if they wanted a moment of quiet with one another. Children seemed to cluster wherever Crowley looked – whooping and screaming like wild animals released from captivity, burying snot-crusted faces into mounds of ice-cream, falling over and skinning their silly little knees…

On this day, a pram was near the bench. Which was unusual in itself. Nobody ever tended to notice the Angel and the Demon as they sat on the bench and watched the world go by – usually it was as if they had their own personal bubble, never pierced. No child ever stumbled, no dog ever sniffed, no mother ever questioned or proffered the local gossip.

There was a baby in the pram. Crying and flailing like it was an octopus turfed out onto dry land. 

The mother was nearby, too, rolling the pram back and forth and tutting unhappily to herself as the baby’s face only screwed up harder and its cries grew in intensity. “Oh baby… here, let me get you an icecream, alright?”  
She eyed Crowley, as if she was deciding that Crowley didn’t have a ‘baby snatcher’ sort of look to his features. Crowley looked out of the corner of one eye and rearranged himself so he sat tall on the bench in a ‘I am not a baby snatcher’ sort of way.  
That seemed to be confirmation enough. The mother went toward the icecream cart. Crowley watched as she did, intently, until she disappeared into a tracksuit-wearing blot amongst a throng of similar tracksuit-wearing blots (…and Aziraphale, who was tasked with retrieving their icecreams for the day.)  
In other words… the coast was entirely clear.

Crowley turned toward the baby. “Why all the crying?” he tutted in a theatrical cooing sort of voice that he had never heard himself use before, and scrunched up his nose for good measure. “Hard life, being a baby, is it?”

The baby’s movements slowed considerably, as it took in Crowley for the first time. Crowley took the wailing creature in too, and scoffed. “…Try being a Demon.” 

The baby soaked this information up.  
Tears trickled slowly down its red-cheeked face all the same; and after some consideration it let out an anguished wet sounding sob - the kind that itched at your spine and spurred you on to soothe the cries.  
…Which was exactly what it did to Crowley. The sound made him feel quite sick, actually. How his fellow Demons could relish it was a puzzle he had yet to solve. “…Nononono,” he pleaded weakly, “Don’t cry, don’t cry!”  
How… how was he meant to soothe a crying baby…? Shushing it was doing very little… lifting it up was not an option, nor was feeding it, and Crowley was not even going to consider changing its nappy.  
Frantic, he reached out and pressed at one of the bulging squeaky toys attached to the pink trim of the pram.  
The crying was cut off abruptly, tiny gaze watching as Crowley squeaked the toy, which let out a high pitched whine. The whine echoed and hung in the air for a long, long moment. Crowley looked at it, then at the baby, and he held his breath.

The baby flinched, dissolving into a fresher (louder) round of screaming tears. Crowley sighed to himself, recalling his little party trick while he was Nannying. The last resort. 

Under the safety of his glasses the familiar sensation of his skin shifting and tightening into scales began once more.  
He had to control this. Just a little peek, no more, and back to normal before the baby’s mother came back or he would be in more trouble than he would have liked. Shifting, with a surreptitious glance to make sure no one – mother or Aziraphale – was going to catch him, he lifted his glasses from his face and threw his red tresses back to reveal his Serpent form there to the baby. His pink forked tongue unrolled and he blew a raspberry in the infant’s direction, hisses building up beneath it. “I sssaid…” he hissed; except he hissed softly, “there’ssss no need for all of thesssse tearsss!”

The baby was silent. It was not a frightened silence or even a worried kind, it was the curious kind – drinking Crowley in again like he was a whole new person. The tiny person wriggled. Crowley’s scales (although they were dull black) glittered and sparkled in the sunlight. His tongue was all pink and long and squishy-looking and it wriggled a bit like a worm.

Crowley hissed again--a little louder--noticing the little one’s gaze locked on his forked tongue. His tongue wriggled teasingly as the hiss built up from the back of his throat.

The baby giggled. And as Crowley stuck out his tongue and hissed and leaned forward pretending to gobble up all of the baby’s fat little arms and legs (while mumbling that ‘he was a demon and demons ate up all the unhappy babies in the world for their dinner, so I’d cheer up if I were you!’, because, you know, Demonic duty) that giggle cascaded into a full burst of laughter – and then another, and then another, before the baby lost all of her breath. 

“Crowley, what in the Heavens are you doing…?”

Crowley snapped away from the baby in an instant, features transforming back to his usual self. He coughed in surprise in the midst of trying to think of an excuse. “You know… demon… stuff. Eating this baby. People Downstairs told me to.” He smacked his lips just to make things look that extra smidgen more convincing. “Tastes like chicken.”

Aziraphale wrinkled his nose. “I’d think ice-cream tastes better.” He offered the cone; to which Crowley grasped eagerly.  
-

Finally, they were at the Ritz. Crowley really quite thought that babies should have been banned from the Ritz. What would a baby get out of being at the Ritz? It was hardly as if they had lobster langoustine baby puree…  
Still, they were sharing their booth with a young child. Not through choice, rather that the child was sat in the booth opposite theirs and trying, really rather valiantly, to escape the tight grip of his father and hop over into the private booth that Crowley and Aziraphale were sharing. 

“No, Timothy, you can’t climb. Settle like a good boy, now.” His father soothed, rubbing his back.  
Timothy was not pleased with this news. Squirming, he fought against his father’s iron-clad grip. Next to them, was a man with the most fantastic red hair that looked like pretty waves of fire, and a man with the whitest of white hair and wings like a birdie.  
He whimpered in frustration, groaned and struggled, and when his father really wouldn’t let go he sobbed, loudly and really rather brattily, as that usually got him what he wanted.

Crowley looked up when he heard the cries, fork pausing on his plate. He didn’t quite know why but suddenly he had developed this instinct - whenever he heard a baby cry – to soothe it. Connecting gaze with the young child, he let a tiny soothing smile grace his features and waved very slightly. 

The crying stopped instantly, swamped instead by curiosity, and the wet eyed child wriggled on the sofa, clambering up onto its back so he could get a closer look at the Angel and the Demon behind him. Crowley beckoned him forward, smiling, and forward the child clambered. 

“Crowley…” Aziraphale placed his fork down, frowning. “What are you doing?”

As soon as the child was as close to the Demon as he could possibly get, Crowley’s expression changed. The black scales of his serpent form began to connect on his skin… and he took that as his cue to “Mbleh!” loudly, sticking out his tongue and scrunching up his face a little bit. 

The child jolted in surprise, his mouth in a perfect, ‘o’ shape as he lost his grip in shock and fell back onto his bottom.  
There was a long moment of silence… before he – like all those before him – crumbled into bursting laughter and lolled cheerfully around the sofa of his booth.

As Crowley’s scales began to fade Aziraphale was looking at him in amusement in between spearing apart slivers of broccoli with his fork. “…you know, when the wind changes, you’ll get stuck like that.”

Crowley scoffed, ducking into his food as if it was the most interesting plate he had ever seen. He shrugged. “I’m only doing my duty as a Demon… spreading misfortune…”

But Crowley knew, and Aziraphale knew, and Crowley knew that Aziraphale knew, that was just a little bit of a lie.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos appreciated. Much love.


End file.
